March 21, 2010

Yesterday, after spending a while poring through all of these family pictures and a run, I met up with a friend named Doug who lives here in Sao Paulo and went to Princeton with me. We had lunch in Vila Madelena and hung out there through the afternoon, people-watching, chatting about living here in Brazil. Eventually we met up with his group of expat guys for dinner at a trendy Thai restaurant in Itaim. It was me, Doug, Doug’s Argentinean roommate who just arrived back in Sao Paulo after going home to Buenos Aires for a while (and he had gone to school in the US and lived in Chicago and Atlanta, New York and London), another American guy, a Columbian who works with Doug, a Brit named Omar, a guy who was born in the US, lived in Rio until he was ten and then lived back in the US until this year, and a beautiful Brazilian girl who had spent the last fifteen years in London and somewhere else in Europe (not clear) who looked like she was my age and had a five-year-old daughter and an eight-year-old son. It was an interesting scene, and mostly it reminded me of what my brother Zach’s life was probably like when he moved to London in his mid-twenties. The guys were uniformly generally pretty charming–dressed in a mix of jeans with dark button downs and pastel polos, but really only talked about how much they were working, how little they were sleeping, rounds of golf, traveling (Oh, I can’t go to Floripa that weekend, I’ll be in Istanbul, and the weekend after in Buenos Aires, but maybe we can go to Caracas in May?), and girls. “Dude, did you see the hostess?” was definitely uttered a couple of times. No girl was referred to by name or as a girlfriend, but there were a few that were hot enough that they would merit another trip to Rio or to Floripa. Man, they were such boys. It was funny just to listen.

February 8, 2010

When Scott first went to the Skadden Sao Paulo office in December, he ran into a guy that he knew from Penn (the guy had subletted a room in the house he was living in from one of Scott’s buddies who was abroad.) This guy invited us to his friend’s Superbowl party tonight. So we grabbed an early dinner and went to the address of the party, take the elevator to the eleventh floor and knock on the door. Turns out the host of the party was a guy I went to school with who was part of a group of guys a year older than me that we were all friends with. Wild. It was fun to hang out with a bunch of Americans and a few Brazilians and watch the game. Without strong rooting interests, I’m glad the Saints won.

January 6, 2010

I had a coffee date this morning with a lovely woman who lives across the street and found me through my blog. She’s also an ex-pat, Argentinean, and it was great to trade tips on local restaurants and travel stories. It makes me hopeful that we will get connected to an ex-pat group here. If only the country didn’t slow down so dramatically between Christmas and Carnival.